Score Media Case Study

Score Media Ventures is the digital arm of Score Media, Inc. Score Media Ventures offers fans multiplatform content, displaying the edgy side of sports news and information. Score Media’s primary asset, theScore Television Network (“theScore”), is a national specialty television service providing sports news, information, highlights, and live event programming in more than 6.8 million homes across Canada.

The company’s digital media assets include theScore.com and some of the industry leading mobile sports applications ScoreMobile, ScoreMobile FC, and SportsTap, which reach over three million unique users per month. Score Media’s mobile applications are available for multiple platforms, including iPhone, iPad, Blackberry smartphones, Playbook, Android handhelds and tablets, and Windows 7 phones.

Oliver Gayagoy, VP, Technology for Score Media, explains the company’s primary business challenge: “It’s critical to maintain a balance between rapid development cycles, service uptime, and transparent access to sports data.”

Gayagoy describes the situation prior to signing on with AWS, “We wanted our digital offerings to scale quickly and seamlessly, and needed an avenue to move away from the typical managed hosting scenario. Limited by our previous provider and onsite facilities, we decided it was best to investigate cloud computing vendors.”

For Gayagoy, AWS “fits the bill.” Score Media currently uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for application instances, Amazon EC2 Elastic IP Addresses to help flush out application servers, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for storage of sports feeds and articles, and Amazon RDS read replicas for backup purposes.

For other developers, Gayagoy offers the following advice: “It’s important to assess the tools available in the cloud. You need to ask yourself how this infrastructure can create efficiencies that leverage greater economic output and economies of scale while adhering to your firm’s fiscal regulations.”

Gayagoy plans to make use of additional AWS services in the future, and appreciates the platform’s flexibility. He says, “AWS provides an effective way to rapidly scale our online business while mitigating the risk of downtime.”